Boosting your small business’s appeal often includes implementing a solid marketing strategy, which can require a merchant cash advance. By exchanging a fixed dollar amount for your future credit card sales, you can receive up to $250,000 to use on a marketing campaign that can potentially net your small business much more than the sum you borrowed.

However, in order to ensure that the marketing campaign is a success and that this investment is paying off, you need to track the appropriate metrics. Many larger companies will have dedicated marketing departments focusing solely on tracking ROI on every aspect of a marketing campaign. But as a small business owner, you might very have to handle all of the diverse parts of marketing all by yourself.

Without measuring the results of the marketing techniques, you cannot evaluate their effectiveness. You might as well be throwing away the money spent on the marketing campaign. Instead, it’s important to establish a set of trackable metrics you can use to quantify your marketing efforts and guarantee success. Using a system, you can set up milestones for key performance metrics like lead generation and conversion. In addition, these systems allow you to judge the success of a strategy, and if it is not working, you can then pivot to one that’s more lucrative.

There are many different ways to track the effectiveness of a marketing campaign and calculate ROI, and here are just a few examples:

Ditch the stickies
Since small business owners need to wear so many hats, they have a greater tendency to write out their thoughts, strategies and findings on whatever is available, often sticky notes or outdated forms. Even with the best filing systems, these documents can easily get lost. Further, it can be extremely difficult, even impossible, to truly extract and analyze the data written out on paper. Migrating all the marketing material into a digital format is a smart choice. There is a variety of software that manages and records the entire conversion process, allowing you to track the source of every lead – whether it’s via phone, email, social media, mailers or something else entirely – through to the final sale.

Use the web
Since so much of modern marketing involves utilizing Internet-based platforms and channels, there are many online tools available for measuring all of these factors. According to RazorSocial, a social media/content marketing blog, Google Analytics lets you measure people’s engagement with your website, such as returning visitors, audience engagement rate, average time spent on site, bounce rate and the conversion rates from different sources. Armed with this data, you can then tailor your marketing strategy to more accurately target the type of people who are more likely to convert.

Don’t forget networking
Not all marketing is done via social media or traditional techniques. This is especially true for business-to-business marketing, which often involves networking at trade shows, conventions and other professional gatherings. However, according to a recent survey by Display Wizard, a supplier of display stands, 44 percent of trade show exhibitors don’t measure the ROI of these events. This represents a major missed opportunity for these small businesses. Trade shows and conventions require a lot of upfront capital expenditures, from buying space and promotional materials to paying vendors and employees, but they also represent a good example of how to leverage a small business loan into growth. However, if you’re tracking how this money is spent, attending these events can potentially be a waste of time and money. Establishing clear-cut and definable marketing goals, such as generating 25 amount of new sales leads or collecting 50 business cards,